With the advent of the computer age, computer and software users have grown accustomed to user-friendly software applications that help then write, calculate, organize, prepare presentations, send and receive electronic mail, make music, and the like. For example, modern electronic word processing applications allow users to prepare a variety of useful documents. Modern spreadsheet applications allow users to enter, manipulate, and organize data. Modern electronic slide presentation applications allow users to create a variety of slide presentations containing text, pictures, data or other useful objects.
Often documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and the like, generated by such applications are embedded with document objects from other documents generated by other applications. For example, a user may desire to embed a chart object from a spreadsheet application document into a memorandum document generated by a word processing application. Or, a user may desire to embed a word processing document object into a slide presentation document. While such embedded objects may be displayed in the receiving document, operating on embedded objects via the receiving document application is very limited. For example, a user may be able to move an embedded object in the receiving document using the functionality of the receiving document application, but the user may not interrogate or modify the data contained in the embedded object. For example, if a user desires to modify data contained in a chart object that has been embedded in a word processing document, the user may be required to go back to the providing application document (e.g., spreadsheet application document) to make modifications to the data contained in the embedded chart object, followed by a replacement or update of the embedded chart object in the receiving document.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.